Youthline NZ

A program with solid potential but suffering a lack of strategy and resources and some really dirty data.

Took on BAU + spotted the opportunities + built the foundations.

Youthline’s first real tax appeal, a board-approved strategy, and a fundraising program geared for growth.

Youthline is one of New Zealand’s most recognised mental health organisations, providing crisis counselling, support and community education to young people across the country. By late 2024, they had the foundations of an individual giving program in place: two phone agencies acquiring new regular givers through lead generation at pace, as well as a successful peer-to-peer program driving new fundraisers and single gift donors. The acquisition infrastructure was there but the fundraising expertise to manage it was lacking.

When Amplify Fundraising came on board, one part-time admin person was responsible for the entire fundraising operation. Much of her time was spent answering phones, entering data and managing workarounds she’d been shown but didn’t fully understand. She was doing the best she could with the great skills she had but she wasn’t a career fundraiser – yet.

Data was being managed across multiple spreadsheets. The phone agencies had no performance benchmarks. No one had a clear picture of what the donor base actually looked like – or best practice knowledge of what it should. And at the bottom of all of that…no fundraising strategy.

When Anastasia Potter came on board as Fundraising Director mid-engagement, she was walking into an organisation with real ambition but no roadmap, and no organisational buy-in to build one.

Amplify Fundraising came in to support an appeals program. Within weeks, it was clear the work needed to go much deeper. The team took on the full business-as-usual fundraising function – the kind of work that would have simply stopped happening if no one picked it up.

Kim managed supplier relationships, agency performance, campaign execution and data flows. Paul worked alongside Anastasia, providing the on-the-ground analysis and strategic thinking she needed to understand the program and start making the case for change inside the organisation.

At the same time, Amplify Fundraising’s curiosity led them to find four key factors that truly defined the engagement.
1. Diagnosing and fixing the data problem
A detailed audit of the donor database revealed a significant duplicate issue stemming from how their donation platform, Raisely fed peer-to-peer donor data into their CRM. Donations to the Raisely pages resulted in new records being created in the CRM, regardless of whether that donor already existed. The result was a database that looked far larger than it actually was – and a set of reporting and retention figures that couldn’t be trusted.

We identified the source of the problem, built the business case for a fit-for-purpose fix, and brought in the right business partners to remediate it. That meant showing not just what a fix would cost, but also what the status quo was costing them.

2. Rebuilding trust in storytelling
When we started developing content for appeals, they hit an unexpected wall. We discovered that Youthline’s phone counsellors didn’t have trust in the fundraising function. Getting authentic, current stories from frontline workers about the impact of their work and the young people whose lives they were helping to save –the lifeblood of a compelling appeal – was impossible because of that broken trust.

Amplify Fundraising worked to understand where the breakdown had come from, then helped to rebuild trust which led to the creation of authentic, strengths-based, de-identified stories that everyone could get behind. That shift made for more effective appeals and started repairing a relationship that mattered well beyond any single campaign.

3. Giving Youthline the data to make the case
With cleaner data and campaign results in hand, we built income projections and donor forecasts from the ground up. These gave the team the evidence they needed to take a fundraising strategy to the board and CEO. This was not a wish list, but a credible investment plan grounded in the organisation’s own numbers.

4. Laying the foundations for major donor engagement
At this stage, Youthline had no philanthropy program in place. Amplify Fundraising identified prospects within the existing base, built out segmentation, and put the foundational practices of relationship fundraising in place, ready for when internal philanthropy resource was on board. The structure was already there, Amplify Fundraising just helped make sense of it.

Prior to engaging Amplify Fundraising, Youthline had no fundraising strategy approved by leadership. The fundraising function had been delivering tactics without a plan, marginal investment without a framework.

When the board and CEO signed off on a new strategy which was supported by the income projections and data-driven forecasts Amplify Fundraising had built, it represented a genuine shift for Youthline. Not just in what they were doing, but in how leadership understood how fundraising could become sustainable and what that would mean for the organisation.

The pivotal factor was evidence. What Youthline needed was the data to tell the story with authority. Paul provided that, and in doing so, enabled the sign-off that followed.

Over the course of 2024 and 2025, Youthline’s fundraising program was transformed. The work created something the organisation had never had before — clarity, clean data, and the credibility to act on both. This looked like:

• Youthline’s first properly structured tax appeal, raising $82,000 — a program that had previously generated less than a quarter of that.
• An expanded appeals calendar, with more campaigns and more touch points across the donor year.
• Identification of a critical duplicate data issue, diagnosed and resolved, giving the organisation a donor file it could actually trust and build from.
• A fundraising strategy was developed and formally signed off by the board and CEO, with a credible investment plan attached to it.

And also something less quantifiable – the rebuilt trust between Youthline’s frontline counsellors and the fundraising team by using a strengths-based, authentic approach to donor storytelling.

Since engaging the Amplify Fundraising team, Youthline has also hired a permanent fundraising team member, who has taken over the fundraising program and made it her own. Recently, Paul and the team have been asked back to cover her maternity leave, a sign of their trust in Amplify Fundraising and their commitment to the program itself.

In the end, the measure of the engagement wasn’t what Amplify Fundraising built. It was what Youthline was able to build on once we had been there.